Germany marked 35 years since the Berlin Wall fell with festivities on Saturday under the theme “Preserve Freedom!”, against the somber backdrop of war in Gaza and Ukraine, and fears that democracy is under attack around the world.
The liberal ideals of 1989 “are not something we can take for granted”, Chancellor Olaf Scholz said on Friday, just days after his governing coalition collapsed.
“A look at our history and at the world around us shows this,” added Scholz, whose three-party alliance imploded the day Donald Trump was re-elected US president, plunging Germany into political turmoil and towards new elections.
November 9, 1989, is celebrated as the day East Germany opened the borders to the West after months of peaceful mass protests, paving the way for German reunification and the collapse of Soviet Communism.
That “joyful day” underlines the sombre fact “that freedom and democracy have never been a given”, Berlin mayor Kai Wegner told a commemoration service at the Berlin Wall Memorial on Saturday.
One Berliner who remembers the momentous events, retiree Jutta Krueger, 75, said it was “a shame” Germany’s political crisis had erupted just before the anniversary weekend.
“But we should still really celebrate the fall of the Wall,” she said, hailing it as the moment East Germans could travel and “freedom had arrived throughout Germany”.
Bernhard Hodtke, 93, lived in East Berlin and recalled crossing into the other side with a colleague the next day.
“We went down Friedrichstrasse”, a central avenue formerly divided by the wall, “and pinched our arms”.
Saturday’s event at the Berlin Wall Memorial, which was attended by President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, honored at least 140 people killed trying to flee the Russian-backed German Democratic Republic (GDR) during the Cold War.
